Chapter 14: Six Months Later

Six months.

I know it has been six months because the succulent has grown three inches, and I have run out of the tea I brought from Ironveil and replaced it twice, and because my body now knows the specific weight of this city in a way that is different from knowing a place and closer to belonging to one.

The mornings go like this: tea at seven, the walk to the institute that takes eleven minutes if I go the short way and fourteen if I go past the coffee shop on Marsh Street, which I do more often than the eleven-minute version would suggest. They know my order there now. The woman behind the counter starts it when she sees me come through the door. This is a small thing, and I have noticed that I look forward to it, which tells me something about what six months of building from scratch has done to my sense of what constitutes a good day.

The work is good. Dr. Elan has given me more of the research side and less of the data entry, which happened gradually and then all at once, the way shifts in trust tend to go. I understand what we are looking at now. The Sleeping Alpha research is still incomplete in the literature, thin in places, almost deliberately so, which is its own kind of information. I have started keeping a separate notebook.

My power comes in steadily. Not dramatically. It does not announce itself. It is more like a tide than a wave: slow, consistent, and always a little further up the shore than the last time I checked. The command voice has emerged twice in controlled conditions, tested in private, which is the only way I am comfortable testing something I do not yet fully understand. I am learning what I am the way you learn a language you were never taught: by immersion, by error, by the slow accumulation of things that suddenly make sense.

The ghost is still there at 3am.

It is less raw than it was. I have stopped reaching toward it in my sleep, which I count as real progress because the body tends to be more honest than the mind, and my body has apparently updated its position. I still make the tea. I still sit with it for the thirty-odd minutes it takes to fade. But I do not dread waking anymore, and I do not feel the warmth as a loss the way I did in the first weeks. I feel it as a question I have not answered yet. That is a different thing.

I have two friends.

Dasha is a human lab technician who brings pastries on Tuesdays and asks nothing about the wolf world, which I find restful in a way I did not anticipate. She talks about her sister and her apartment and a television show I have never watched, and I listen, and it is uncomplicated and warm. Marcus is a city-pack wolf who has known I am independent since week two and has never once made it a topic of conversation. We run together on Tuesday evenings sometimes. He is consistent. I value consistency.

Then there is Zephyr.

He started at the institute on a Monday. Unaffiliated, no pack, running with a loose city group. He walked into Section B on his second day while I was in the middle of a result analysis and read the data upside-down from across the desk without being invited to.

"Sorry," he said. "Was that rude? I noticed the inconsistency in the third column."

"It is a test variable," I said. "I know it is there."

"Right. Good. I will go away now."

"You do not have to," I said.

He stayed for twenty minutes. I got less work done than usual. I did not mind this as much as I expected to.

He asked me to coffee a week later. I said I did not date coworkers. He said it was not a date. I said it was as if he was thinking about it being one. He grinned at that, a specific grin that meant he had been caught being transparent, and said he would try not to think about it.

We went for coffee.

He did not think about it being a date out loud. It was, a little. I knew this and did not address it, which was either wisdom or avoidance, and I have not determined which.

I caught myself, walking home afterward, thinking: this was good. This easy thing, this hour of uncomplicated conversation with someone who asked real questions and did not require anything from me that I was not ready to give. I had forgotten what easy felt like. Not forgotten, exactly. I had not had much occasion to remember.

That was two weeks ago. We have had coffee three times since. Each time I walk home thinking the same thing.

It is 9pm now. The succulent is on the windowsill where it has lived for six months, visibly larger than the day I brought it home, which feels like a small proof of something.

"I think I might be okay," I tell him.

This is not a small thing to say. I am aware of that. I have not said it before, not even to myself, not even in the approximate version of it that sounds like I am managing or I am getting through it. This is different. This is: I think I might be okay. Present tense. Not performance.

The succulent appears to consider this.

It appears to believe me.

I go to bed at ten, which is new. For the first five months I did not fall asleep before midnight, which was the cost of having a mind that did not know how to stop reviewing the day once the day was over. Something has shifted in the last few weeks. I fall asleep faster. I wake up less.

At 3am the ghost will come. I know this. It has come every night for six months, and it will come tonight, and I will make the tea and sit with it, and it will fade by 3:47 or thereabouts, and I will go back to sleep.

I am not dreading it.

I am sitting with the thought of it the way you sit with a thing you have decided to set down somewhere and have not found the right place for yet. Not avoiding it. Not holding it too tight. Just holding it until I know what to do with it.

I turn off the light.

I close my eyes.

I am asleep before eleven.

I do not hear the notification that comes in at 11:23, the one from the institute's visitor access system logging a new credentialed guest for Thursday's wolf health initiative meeting.

I do not see the name on it until morning.